Ordinary households in São Paulo sort their garbage and put it out as green waste or recyclables. The city’s garbage trucks collect green waste every day and recyclables twice a week. If you want to sort your recyclables more carefully, I advise you to take them somewhere like a major supermarket.
They have places where you can deposit your recyclables on the parking lot floors of shopping malls and major supermarkets, where you can deposit paper and plastic, empty cans, coffee capsules, batteries, and so on. You can also bring your used cooking oil from home, in which case you bring it in a plastic bottle.
Did you know that you can make soap from used oil? I see cars going around some parts of São Paulo collecting oil.
Of course, to reduce waste, we have to reduce how much we buy. We have to think about reusing things. And we have to recycle. I read somewhere that it’s these 3 things that are important. I want to reduce waste as much as possible, so I try to do what I can. I always carry a reusable shopping bag with me. As well as that, now I always pay close attention to see what sorts of things are being collected.
The store in the photo sells children’s pajamas and socks, and accepts clean single socks, old socks, socks with holes, and so on. The idea is that once you have used the socks you buy at this store, you return them to the store. Another aspect of this initiative is to reduce fiber waste. And they turn the socks people bring back into blankets then distribute them to homeless people. It takes about 40 pairs of socks to make 1 blanket. They have taken back 1.89 million pairs of socks since the initiative started 10 years ago and have distributed more than 55,000 blankets.
Haven’t you ever had the problem of winding up with excess medicine prescribed by a hospital or clinic, or medicine that is past its use-by date? Pharmacies in São Paulo accept left-over medicines. They also accept the medication box and information sheet. While I think it is OK to treat left-over medicines as burnable garbage, it is probably a good idea to take them to a pharmacy.
Some cell phone stores will give you a bit of a discount when you buy a new phone if you bring in your old one. It’s good to have a service like this because the method of disposing of cell phones is not straightforward.
There is a non-government organization (NGO) that accepts plastic caps from plastic bottles, and so on. It sells the caps as a recycling resource and puts the profits towards the cost of sterilizing feral cats and dogs. They ask inside shopping centers and stores for you to donate your plastic caps.
The NGO that I give my plastic caps buys wheelchairs.
They also accept pull tabs from cans, melt the aluminum in them, then recycle and reuse it. There is an NGO that asks for pull-tab donations to buy wheelchairs.
I found this disused refrigerator in the lobby of a hotel I stayed in. It had been painted in bright colors and turned into a bookcase. There were a number of books inside and anyone could freely borrow them to read. They were also asking for book donations.
I want to keep on reusing and recycling.
